Planetary Defense and Future Outlook

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Hire the right pro today In nineteen ninety three, astronomers discovered something orbiting Jupiter It was a comment that have been broken into many pieces by Jupiter's gravity Some scientists described it looking like a string of pearls It didn't take long for them to realize that the comet was on track to smash right into Jupiter and It just raised a lot of eyebrows because it was the first time in human history that we'd seen one of these Really intense u potentially catastrophic impacts happening. in the solar system. It kind of scared a lot of people, I think Homet fragments crashed into Jupiter over a period of several days with the combined force of three hundred million atomic bombs one of the impact scars left a hole in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The upper atmosphere that was the size of Earth Um You know, if something like that had hit the Eth it would be devastating to All life. One NASA scientist called the collision a punch in the gut and said that it was the wake upp call that we needed. be monitoring asteroids and comets in the solar systemy Coners directed NASA to start finding and cataloging NEOos. near Earth objects that were one kilometer or wider Today, David Rankin works as a nighttime observer Catalina Sky sururvey at the top of Mount Lemon outside Tucson, Arizona So an observer's job is to sit at the telescope all night fromom sundown to sun up In the sumertime, that's real nice because the nights are short but in the winterime, that's a twelve plus hour night And um you're up all night, just hunting astoids. that's your Full time job You know what this is gonna be? This is a public service episode. This is the man that we need to be talking to. Hazardous asteroids coming at us. Yeah I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is loveove You must think sometimes looking up or when the telescope registers something, that could be something that's so big that it could kill millions of people, and I'm gonna be the first person who put my eyes on it. So it's always in the back of your mind. and I promise this is true for all the observers. We all know in the back of our mind somewhere that we could be the person that picks up the object that's going to really do some damage. But I think all of us have a pretty healthy respect for the fact that the odds of that happening are pretty low David Rankin grew up in a small town in southern Utah withith around five hundred people. I mean, we were probably five hours from the next large city. and The skies I grew up under in southern Utah were I mean, I They're ink black. It's just hard to explain how dark it gets down there during a new moon and then when the sky is clear you can You can look out into the night sky under those type of conditions and it just feels like the Universe is going pluck you off the Earth It's it's almost a sense of verigo of the skies are so dark. and u You can easily see the Milky W wayay. rising and setting and It's hard to I'd say it's hard to grow up in an area like that and not just be fascinated and have a connection with a nice guy, which is, you know, what most people had throughout human history David remembers spending hours as a kid, just looking up at the stars. He'd go up on the roof of their trailer. sometimes by himself, sometimes with his siblings Even as kids, you know, we would know constellations like, oh, that's Cassiopia. Oh, that's Sagittarius or, you know, like you would just kind of learn them because you would see them so often David says one night when he was about twelve He looked up and saw something he'd never seen before I just remember being a kid running around the neighborhood at night and seeing this giant flashlight hanging in the sky. just like I would pause and just look at it. likeike what is going on there? look like somebody just had a flashlight in the sky David's father told him it was a comment. This comet was what you would call like a once a century type comet Scott extxtremely bright. So comments They from They come from very far away and they can be on orbits that are, you know, millions of years Um, so this this just happened to be a really interesting comment that hadn't come through for thousands of years Comets are made up of ice and dust materials left over from the formation of the solar system. They orbit the Sun. Most of them originate from very far away Some can be seen from Earth at certain points of their orbits This means that some of the comets we've discovered have been seen by humans before and willll be seen again It just might take thousands or even millions of years As one astronomer has put it, quote Periodic comments is a giant pendulum clock in the sky. Every swing is not a few seconds, but many human civilizations. rising and falling. David saw as a kid was called Hail Bob A reporter wrote that the last time it had been visible from Earth The grandeur of Rome and Athens lay centuries in the future The Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs were yet to be plough was just coming into widespread use in Europe. where settled agriculture was still a novelty and cities, unheard of Some people believe there could be a reference to this particular comet in an ancient Egyptian phharaoh's tomb Hieroglyphs, referring to a star Bong hair In the nineties, it was visible to the naked eye for eighteen months It was so bright, it could even sometimes be seen in the daytime Scientific American reported that websites posting photos and updates of the comet were so popular that quote They're causing a traffic jam on the internet. which was new at the time David says growing up, his family was fundamentalist Mormon He says his father believed that the comet was a sign from the heavens The next time Hil Bob will be visible from Earth will be around the year four thousand three hundred and eighty David, never stop thinking about that comment One day he heard about another comet that was going to be visible from Earth. What was unusual about this one was the cloud of gas and dust around it what's known as the coma had suddenly become much bigger It had gone into what's known as an outburst and Just this really beautiful blue giant coma blew up around this comet and the gas cloud around the comet did get larger than the sun. It was briefly the largest object in the solar system David decided he wanted to see it for himself So I just got online and Googled, How do I build a telescope We'll be right back To listen without ads, join Criminal plus Portf's love comes from talkchiatry If you've ever wanted to meet with a psychiatrist, two things can make it difficult insurance andong waitlists Psychiatry makes the process a lot easier You can see a licensed psychiatrist online who takes your insurance in just a few days Psychiatry is a hundred percent online psychiatry practice that provides evaluations, diagnoses, and medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, and more Unlike therapy only platforms, talkchiatry is psychiatry You meet a medical provider who can diagnose mental health conditions and prescribe medication when it's appropriate They have more than eight hundred in network clinicians, and you can meet with the same provider every time rather than constantly starting over. 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So I got on eBay, I ordered some What I thought at the time were decent quality mirrors, they were not learening process and yeah, end end up getting some like old water main pipes And uh gotot together with my older brother and He's like, I one one two, so we started working together and we built two of our very first reflecting telescopes. They work And it immediately dawned on me after I built a telescope that it was just a giant lens. So I uh I just Like how do I take photos with this thing David had a nice camera. attached it to the eyeepiece of the telescope. The first picture he took was of the Orion nebula Neepbulas have been called the nurseries of the universe areas where new stars are born The Orion Nebula is the closest star forming region to Earth fifteen hundred light years away The ancient Mayans believed it was the quote Cosmic fire of creation. From a really dark sky, this is actually one of the few nebula you can see with a naked eye. If you have a really dark sky right under Orion's belt. That's kind of a fuzzy patch And so I pointed the telescope at that and I just took must have been five second exposure And I looked at the image and when it came in on the back of the DLLR there were just reds and blues. and I mean, it looked like Something NASA could have shot, you know att that point I was just it was a cliff. I was in and I I dedicated a lot of time from there to learning how to master the art of astrophotography After high school, David got married and started college He studied natural resource management and hoped to get a job with the National Park Service after he graduated And he did. At the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area near where he grew up He worked in IT and help start an astronomy program at the park. When David got home from work, he'd often stay up all night, taking photos of the night sky for fun He says sometimes he'd spend up to twelve hours working on a single image So to take a photo of a galaxy and make it look nice, you have to take a whole bunch of exposures of the same spot because the noise And each image is really high, but it moves randomly And so if you combine all the images, it kind of averages out the noise. So you have You have your first imageine your last image out of a sequence of sometimes hundreds of images that cover hours of time. in the same spot of the sky One day, David heard about another amateur astronomer in Australia who had discovered a number of comets from his backyard It made David wonder if he'd ever photographed something undiscovered. without realizing it I'm like, I'm going look into my old data and I'm going to see If there's anything moving in there because I would like to find a comment and, uh, Sure enough, I animate the series of images of this galaxy I took. and when I did that, I noticed a whole bunch of asteroids moving in the field David says in deep space photography Asteroids are generally considered a nuisance spots blocking out whatever he was actually trying to photograph So I was able to identify all but like two of them And then at that point, I'm like, why can't I identify two of these objects? There's no way there's that many new asteroids out there still left to discover, right? Well, it turns out there is quite a few out there left to discover, and that's also something I didn't know. So At that point, every free second I had with that telescope, I was hunting for a new comet or a new asteroid There's a difference between comets and asteroids. Rs generally come from the outer reaches of the solar system Most asteroids come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter And they're not made out of dust and ice, like comets And they're generally in the flavor of either a pure Rock Silicate rocks down to pure metal Asteroids are just, you can think about it just like a rock flying around in space. One night in December of twenty sixteen David spotted an asteroid that didn't match up with any of the coordinates of any known ones He submitted it to the Minor Planet Center the organization that tracks asteroids and comets He says they seemed interested which made him think maybe he'd discovered something new. wait years to find out He says when you think you've found a new asteroid, you have to wait for it to go around the suun a few times be sure that it hasn't been confused with something we already know about. When he finally learned it was a new asteroid, he got to name it And he named it after his wife, Cecily He also spent a lot of time tracking already known asteroids By this point, he'd heard of the Catalina Sky sururvey outside Tucson And they were often posting data about new possible asteroids and I'd be out there helping track those because tracking new discoveries is Almost just as important as making the discovery itself. You have to keep track of where they're going because they can literally get lost. So they would post a new asteroid, then I'd point my telescope at it and I'd track it down And that helps kind of refine the orbit get the uncertainties knocked down a bit David got to know someone who worked at the Catalina Sky Svey who told him that there was a job opening for a nighttime observer And he encouraged David to apply David wasn't sure if he was qualified Until this point, asteroid hunting was just a hobby He got the job And in twenty nineteen, he and his wife and kids moved to Tucson His new job schedule was completely dictated by the moon and the weather During a full moon, the sky is too bright And if it's cloudy, the telescopes can't see anything At first, David worked with another nighttime observer to learn how everything works U telescopes enough to understand A lot of the intricacies of what was happening But everything was scaled up. So I'm in a giant building now with a roof that rotates U shhakes the whole building when it moves Just huge telescopes These days, David drives to the observatory a few hours before sunset Once he gets outside of Tucson, it's a lot of winding mountain roads to the top of Mount Lemon. Once he's there, he assesses the weather conditions and checks on all of the equipment He says it's crucial that the mirrors in the telescope are the same temperature as the ambient air If not, it can distort what the telescope sees. So he opens up the roof of the observatory and turns on fans to start bringing in fresh air. And then he can get to work. A lot of what the telescope does is automated So most of the night is spent sitting at a computer. comombing through the data coming in from the telescope And if it's a busy night You're picking up new asteroids. You're marking them. as brand new discoveries And then you're quickly turning that data around and getting it published so that anyone in the world can see it. and help track those objects. and Early on, I I still remember the excitement from bagging those first discoveries. It was really it's something different because I'm sitting in my backyard for years and I found Maybe in that time five or six new asteroids and you know, on a busy night on Mount Lemon, we can sometimes pick up over thirty new asteroids in one night That can make his Wallvower and Iight go by quick if you pick up twenty plus objects Of course, it's a slow night When you're only picking up two or three, that can drag a little bit. but There are nights out there that really keep you at the edge of your seat And're all you're all by yourself Yeah, you're up on the mountain by yourself, sundown to sun up David says on a slower night. or when the weather is bad He'll pass the time by watching something on PBS. or Netflix Sometimes he checks in on the first asteroid he ever found named after his wife, Cecily whenever he spots it They'll send her a picture He says some of the other observers like to blast music, really loud One if that brings this guitar It's a lifestyle. you gotta get used to I've seen some turnover. I think people get lonely and then the night shift is hard. but There's a dopamine hit you get with every discovery. and there's always the hope that maybe When you're up there working, you'll find You know, the potentially hazardous asteroid that has our name on it in fifty years I mean, You're on the front lines of solar system discovery And, uh To me, it's It was wild to kind of Step into a job where that is still possible David says he's lost count of the asteroids he personally has discovered He thinks it's probably in the thousands by now. comments are Much more rare. They're like the unicorns of this job. And so if you're working at one of these telescopes and you find a new object. and you can tell that it has a gas cloud on it, which can be very subtle So the asteroids tend to appear kind of sharp. And then the comments tend to appear kind of uzz and sometimes'll have a little tail Since it began in nineteen ninety eight The Catalina skkies sururvey has discovered over eighteen thousand near Earth asteroids and over seven hundred comets In two thousand eight, they discovered the first asteroid in history to be detected before it impacted the Earth. Small asteroids around three feet across, hit Earth a few times every year The meteor that exploded over New England a few weeks ago was only a meter and a half F feet wide David says they've completed the original assignment from Congress Finding ninety percent of the near Earth objects that are over a kilometer wide Now they're looking for objects that are about a tenth of that size, one hundred and forty meters, or about four hundred and sixty feet. So we're looking for objects that are still regionally destructive, but You can rest easy knowing that, you know ninety plus percent of the one kilometer size potentially hazardous asteroids have been found in Catalog You you know my heart cook I think my blood pressure is rising as you were talking about that Yeah. No rest easy. not to downplay the threat of one hundred and forty meter object because those are also extremely dangerous, but one kilometer object would be much worse We'll be right back Port for this is loveve comes from Mint Mo We've all come across things that sound too good to be true, like cheap coffee, where the price makes sense once you taste it The same can happen with phone plans. 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That's indndeed d. com slash podcast Terms and conditions apply If need the right hire fast, then this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs Catalina Sky survey A one kilometer asteroid or comet, hits Earth on average every half a million years The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs sixty six million years ago Probably somewhere between ten and fifteen kilometers wide Even much smaller asteroids can cause a lot of damage. There's a crater outside Flagstaff, Arizona nearly a mile wide and over five hundred feet deep. It came from an asteroid that was somewhere between thirty and fifty meters wide smaller than the objects David is looking for And you can go stand on the rim of this crater. It's really, really humbling That's a thirty to sixty meter wide object. That's not what we would consider a very large asteroid. Something like that happened today, especially anywhere in a populated area, it would be devastating You know, if that had happened over LA or New York or something Today, there would be millions of people dead. The largest impact we've had in modern history happened in the summer of nineteen oh eight in Siberia known as the Tunaska event There are eyewitness accounts from the time of reindeer herders who reported seeing a fireball in the sky and then a bright flash So the extreme pressures of the reentry into the atmosphere can actually raaise the temperature and the pressure of the asteroid so much that it explodes with the force of many, many, many nuclear weapons One farmer who is forty miles from the center of the blast, said quote, The sky appeared like it was split in two. The whole northern sky appeared to be completely covered with blazing fire He said he felt A great wave of heat as if my shirt had caught fire Another witness said he was sleeping in a hut by the river with his brother And they suddenly woke up at the same time The man remembers his brother saying Can you hear all those birds flying overhead They felt the earth shake And when they went outside, quote Trees were falling branches were on fire It became mighty bright as if there were a second son The effects were noticed as far away as London. There were reports of the sky becoming so bright people could read newspapers in the middle of the night Scientists believe the largest object to enter Earth's atmosphere since the Tangaska event Is the asteroid that exploded over Chile Ainens, Russia, in twenty thirteen It was about twenty meters wide And the explosion injured fifteen hundred people Have you ever discovered anything that hit Yeah, I was working in twenty twenty two And this was just pure luck because an asteroid this small is only visible for a very short window of time before it hits us. just by virtue of the fact that it's a tiny aeroid But I just happen to be serving just the right area of the sky kind of off to the west early in the night. And I picked up this object that was kind of streaked which means it was moving fast for our images. and it was I could see it was kind of curving to the west a little bit. So immediately when I picked it up, I was like, this is definitely in near Earth space. L And when I mean near Earth space, I mean sublunar. was L I could tell right away it was closer than the moon byy virtue of the fact it was going fast, it was curving and, uh There's two possibilities at that point. It's either an artificial object, like a booster for some rocket that weve lost track of, which happens all time. We see space junk every night Or it was an incoming asteroid that was going to come very close to us David sent the coordinates of the object to NASA And they calculated its projected path I think the initial probability came back at like twenty five percent impact, so that was pretty exciting. and then Luckily pretty quick, there was a group of amateur astronomers. We're talking like backyard telescopes, There people doing this on their free time in Kansas that head. Targeted the rock These amateur astronomers sent in the data they were collecting too, just like David used to do from his own backyard. And so after they had submitted their positions on it, the impact score went up to one hundred. And we knew at that point that it was going to hit somewhere in Canada. And then pretty quickly after that enough observatories that hit it that we knew was going to hit over Toronto in the next three hours It was only the sixth asteroid ever to be discovered before hitting Earth It was very small, only around twenty inches long It broke up in the atmosphere over Toronto and people reported seeing a fireball What are things that humans could do if something big was coming? My thought is get in the car and start driving, but that's about it Well, u, again, the hope, the hope is that we can find I mean, this is going to happen again. It's as certain as the sun rising In the morning, it's as certain as a volcano blowing up somewhere in the Eth. again. This is a natural process. It's been going on for billions of years. It's not just going to stop. We're going to get hit by another asteroid. We're going to hit by another large asteroid at some point Um The point is we want that lead time. So The investment that NASA and Congress has made right now is to build that lead time. So We have a lot of time to think about this. We can say, okay, we just found this half kilometer wide asteroid It's going to hit somewhere in Europe. This is hypothetical, anybody that's listening. It's not something we actually found So say we're going to find this hu asterid might h somewhere in Europe in like, twenty fifty or twenty sixty. and you're like, Yeahah, we got all this time to plan for it At that point, yeah we're going to redirect that asteroid. We're going to stop that impact from happening. That is all completely realistic at this point. We've already done this In twenty twenty two, NASA intentionally crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if it was possible to change the direction it was moving And it worked And I think they changed its orbit by almost thirty minutes, which was really impressive because they're not big, they're the small and it's moving at sixty seven thousand miles per hour around the sun. We're cruising right now. And so the impact window for that asteroid is actually pretty short I mean, it's It's really short. It has to be lined up just perfect in order to actually hit the Earth at some point And so don't you don't have to change its orbit dramatically to make that mis happen, especially if you have a thirty year lead time. you just have to nudge it slightly onto a different path And so if we have that lead time, we've demonstrated right now that we have the technology to deal with it. Uh The bigger threat, of course, is that we pick up an asteroid in that size range that's incoming that we haven't seen before That's going to hit us in a couple of weeks. At that point, we're going to be in trouble because you know, an asteroid that's a couple hundred meters wide And you only have a couple weeks to notice That might not be enough time to redirect its orbit There's hypotheticals that have been put out all the way to launching nukes at it to melt off the surface and change its trajectory. but If there isn't enough lead time, it's going to hit us And at that point, I think what you're looking at is probably just evacuating people out of the area and just hope that you have enough lead time David says an asteroid strike is one of the only natural disasters that humans can actually do something about He said You're not going stop a volcano eruption You're not going to stop a tsunami You're not going to stop a magnitude nine point two earthquake This is something we can stop So that's what we're doing David, you have to keep your eyes open Keep looking up Please Please, please, donon't get too bored in there. Just keep your eyes open You know, I I'll be looking at a galaxy at night that's one hundred million light years away. So the photon that left that galaxy before I got to my telescope had been traveling for a hundred million years at the speed of light. Those numbers are humbling. and it just, I don't know, it put a lot of things in perspective. and I guess I've gotten to a point in my life where